Argh! I was so close to realising platforms don’t count. After trying to optimize my earlier solutions I noticed removing them made no difference to block count, but the pellet didn’t drop in my stupid brain that this would be a useful optimization tool. Easy when you know how.

@Gus_Smedstad - Thanks for the welding tips, particularly the comments on moving blocks with pushers - I saw this in action in your GIF but my attempts all failed. I’ll give them another try now.

@Alms - You did it without blockers? I take my hat off to you, I can barely see how to do it with them!

I think I played this a little too close to bed time, as I ended up dreaming and half-asleep thinking about how to tackle Shuttle Maintenance pretty much all night I think. At least some of what I thought of might actually work!

@Gus_Smedstad - Thanks for the welding tips, particularly the comments on moving blocks with pushers - I saw this in action in your GIF but my attempts all failed. I’ll give them another try now.

That particular one is a little trickier than most.

To be movable, a part attached to a pusher must not be adjacent to anything when processing starts. If it’s touching anything, including the floor, it’s attached to that thing. Yet in my GIF, there’s a rotator / conveyor pair attached to the pusher that slides, and they’re adjacent to other conveyors. How does that work?

The key is that parts only have to be isolated at the start. If they’re adjacent later, that’s fine. You can get around a lot by having the assembly floating in air initially, and then fall into place when processing starts.

Also worth noting is that wires that fall into place make connections just like regular wires. So the wire in the left part of the floating assembly that doesn’t connect to anything will connect to the wire on the left side of the screen once it falls

Argh! I was so close to realising platforms don’t count. After trying to optimize my earlier solutions I noticed removing them made no difference to block count, but the pellet didn’t drop in my stupid brain that this would be a useful optimization tool. Easy when you know how.

Yes, that is a case of “you don’t put important information in loading screen tips”. Bad Zach, bad!

Blackice:

@Alms - You did it without blockers? I take my hat off to you, I can barely see how to do it with them!

When the game pulled the same trick again, and revealed that I had blockers all along, a speech balloon with a dumbbell appeared over my head.

Seriously, I tried to think how to change it to bumpers, which are basically pistons with an inverted logic state, it should be a matter of picking a different point for sensors: that design uses two, so I suppose blockers should slightly reduce the block count.

But I couldn’t come up readily with a different location, need to take a little distance from the solution to actually see alternatives.

On that note, I also fiddled a little with it, including a more significant change to how the rockets are welded together: as mentioned, in this design they are welded before assembly, while the variant welded them together and to the shuttle at the same time.

It worked alright, but wasn’t any better than the original in any way. I couldn’t come up with any meaningful enhancement outside of a slightly improved Eviscerator stage that needs a few blocks less.

So, distance. Since it didn’t occurred to me either that platforms weren’t being included in the block count, I went back to tutorial puzzles to reflect on ways to mess with Helio low-block count designs.

Enough times has passed that my solutions are strangers to me, so it’s good practice.

Back to SpaceChem after a drought of many months. I’ve now solved sigma-ethylene, though my solution was 50 cycles over the 6000 necessary for the achievement. It should be easy to shave off 50 cycles, but I don’t know if I’ll bother. SpaceChem breaks my brain enough without worrying about optimization. On to omega-pseudethyne and then the penultimate boss. Maybe I’ll actually beat this thing after several years!

Has anyone played Ironclad Tactics? Any good? I’ve got it, but haven’t played it.

I did, it’s a TCG though, so the core gameplay, at least on the surface, didn’t seem to have anything in common with Zachtronics’ programming games.

I haven’t played much TBH, it introduced a certain unit early on which changed the way battles were resolved, and I ran into a string of losses, being unable to readily figure out what was expected of me; it wasn’t really grabbing me at that stage, my attention was swayed and I never bothered going back to it.

To put this in perspective, the WIT was fairly positive, from what I recall, and am generally not terribly intrigued by TCGs, in fact my interest in Ironclad Tactics stemmed mainly from it being a Zachtronics game.

Back to SpaceChem after a drought of many months. I’ve now solved sigma-ethylene, though my solution was 50 cycles over the 6000 necessary for the achievement. It should be easy to shave off 50 cycles, but I don’t know if I’ll bother. SpaceChem breaks my brain enough without worrying about optimization. On to omega-pseudethyne and then the penultimate boss. Maybe I’ll actually beat this thing after several years!

If you move one of your sync instructions that might already do the trick. If you’re already on 6050 cycles you only need to save one on every pass of your circuit.

Do me a favour and record your solution, I’m very interested in seeing how you did that with such a good symbol score. I have only Ω-Pseudoethyne and Precursor Compounds in 63 Corvi left to do, and both of those require sorting that damned mix of Carbomega. That alone I could have handled, but then every time I output a C=Ω there are two hydrogen molecules that need to come after it, and that I cannot handle.

Has anyone played Ironclad Tactics? Any good? I’ve got it, but haven’t played it.

I played it for a bit, but it didn’t grab me. It’s interesting to see Zachtronics branching out though.

Ironclad was real time, had some cheap design, and telegraphed ‘right choices’, I had fun with the sword wielding robots, but there were so many ‘fuck you’ missions which had failure traps and attrition snowballing.

I need to get back to a Zach game soon, Mini Metro took up residence in that part of my brain, but I’m kinda uninterested in the playing any more Mini Metro, aside from the achievements which are fascinating.

If you move one of your sync instructions that might already do the trick. If you’re already on 6050 cycles you only need to save one on every pass of your circuit.

Do me a favour and record your solution, I’m very interested in seeing how you did that with such a good symbol score.

Yeah, it took about 90 seconds to move a couple of symbols around and squeak under the wire. I uploaded screenshots of the two reactors to my Steam account. Standard recorded solutions for the multiple reactor levels only show the outside view, so aren’t that useful, but I can figure something out if you like.

The top reactor fuses and sends 6 He in a row down to the lower reactor, which fuses those 3x2 to make 2 carbon, bonds those together and alternately sends a correctly bonded diatomic sigma and diatomic carbon back to the top reactor. The top reactor then attaches hydrogen all around the edges and sorts the molecules back to the correct outputs.

I see, that’s pretty clever! I never used the fuser in the bottom reactor and made all my carbon in the top reactor, then passed a hydrogen molecule along after it and assembled them in the top reactor. It’s super unelegant, it makes much more sense to continue fusion in the bottom reactor, but at least it’s quick.

Omega-pseudethylene solved. Phew! It took me 3-4 hours to whittle my way to a solution. The real sticky point is that the 3 varieties of Cromega do not have the same number of carbon-omega ions in them. Once I figured out that the loopback was basically meant to serve as a hydrogen buffer to account for the 14 H2 to 3 cromega *average *ratio (I sent 5 H2’s per cromega; 6 overfilled the buffer, but 5 got me to the goal without overflowing), things started to fall into place. The fact that you always start with 2-in-a-row of the big cromegas was a bit of a pain which required some pre-buffering of hydrogen. Someday, I’ll feel like tackling the defense level for that planet.

Well done! I haven’t solved it yet but my solution in progress involved outputting the correct number of hydrogen molecules for every isomer of carbomega. I’m not yet sure whether that’s even possible, the entire space is already nearly filled up by just processing the first isomer.

Interesting that the sequence of molecules seems to be predetermined. That’s how it seems anyway, because my first two inputs are also (CΩ)3. I guess that makes sense if the leaderboards are to be truly fair, but to see if your solution is truly algorithmic the sequence of inputs should be randomised when mixes of molecules are involved.

This would actually be fine with me as, strangely enough, I think TIS is my favorite of Zach’s games. They’re all brilliant, but TIS is distilled to the bare essence, with just enough weirdness and idiosyncrasy to make it interesting.

I’ve gone back to TIS-100 in an attempt to make headway on that final trophy for solving all the TIS-NET puzzles. I’d gotten stuck on “Sequence Mode Calculator”, which I’m convinced can only be solved by deities. But have now solved the next two at a pace of one per day. Only 9 more to go!

I got my Shenzen collector’s edition binder in the mail yesterday. It’s an old-school plastic-covered 1" 3-ring binder with the instruction manual divided up into sections with tabs. The instruction manual contains some application notes, an MCU language reference and datasheet, other part datasheets, and supplemental data, including a bunch of printed out ads (“This page was designed for Internet Explorer 3.0 or better.”) The front pocket of the binder has a resume and some printed out email letters, a business card in Chinese, a command reference, and an envelope that says “Do Not Open Until Instructed” If you found this binder on a dusty backshelf in a senior engineer’s office, you wouldn’t give it a second glance. I have several very much like it in my own office. It’s perfect. I’ll post pictures at some point. The game should be out tomorrow!